If you are a Small Business customer, find additional troubleshooting and learning resources at the Support for Small Business site.

When you try to update SQL Server 7.0 tables that contain Unicode datatypes from Access 97 or Access 95 using the 3.60.0319 (or earlier) version of the ODBC SQLServer driver, the following error message appears:

Access tries to bind the parameter for the Unicode column, asking the driver to convert from SQL_CHAR/SQL_VARCHAR to SQL_WCHAR/SQL_WVARCHAR. This functionality is not available in the 3.60.xxxx or the previous versions of the SQL Server ODBC Driver.

Access 97 and Access 95 make calls to the catalog API in ODBC, such as SQLTables, SQLColumns, and so forth. These APIs return the datatypes as SQL_WVARCHAR/SQL_WCHAR, and so forth, depending on the actual Unicode datatype in the SQLServer datatypes. Then Access calls SQLBindParameter, requesting conversion to Unicode data in the driver. This feature is not implemented in the 3.60.xxxx version of the SQL Server ODBC Driver.

Avoid using the ntext datatype, even when using the 3.70.xxxx version of the driver, because Access does not recognize this datatype and can cause the #name or #error error.

Steps to Reproduce Behavior

Create a table in SQL Server 7.0 using Unicode datatypes. For example: